The Biggest Threat To Steam Box Is Apple

Lecturing at the University of Texas, Valve boss Gabe Newell said that the largest threat to the proposed Steam Box is most probably Apple.

“The biggest challenge, I don’t think is from the consoles,” Newell said. “I think the biggest challenge is that Apple moves on the living room before the PC industry sort of gets its act together,” added Newell. “The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share, and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform.”

“I think that there’s a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed down living room platform emerging – I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there, and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room?”

Although many predict the death of PC for tablets, Newell suggests that hardware vendors will be able to find a way to get PCs into the living room, for gaming.

“I think a whole bunch of hardware companies are going to be releasing products in the next 12 months – you’ll hear it referred to as Miracast, Shield from Nvidia, or lots of other people,” Newell said. “There are going to be a huge set of products that say, ‘If you want something that’s incredibly cheap, at a price point well below anything that consoles will be able to reach, you’re going to take advantage of the PC that’s running somewhere in your house. It’s like one of those things where afterwards it will seem like it was very simple, when beforehand, everyone sort of denied that it was possible.”

At the moment Apple has the Apple TV which allows one to seamlessly stream and do things on your TV, from any Apple device. Apple is only a few steps away from entering a casual gaming market in the living room, however, is that really what they are looking for?

We recently saw the reveal of the iX3 Piston, which is based on the Steam Box concept.